Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Canadian artist Andreas Rutkauskas questions the experience of the representation of the landscape in a time when every place is over-charted, over-explored or exploited. Can there be something like the experience of witnessing a wilderness anymore? What is triggered inside our mind when we watch something that was once thought to be the source of the experience of the sublime? His project Virtually There takes the interrogative to its limit by matching gps mapping of the Canadian Rocky Mountains with actual views of them, made using the same vantage point of the Google Earth renderings of those virtual images.But aside from this extreme example of searching for a view after the digital trace of a computer-generated image, all his works are about what space is left to discover a new way to look at things, both exploring the natural landscape and documenting the suburban development across Canada.

Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Some days ago one reader left a comment (a pretty rare thing to happen, I have to say) on the post about Gilbert Fastenaekens, pointing out the similar b&w line of work shown by Dutch artist Awoiska van der Molen, where dark alleys and empty corners are filled with some presence that indeed remebers the urban mysteries by the Belgian photographer I recently praised here.

Thursday, May 20, 2010

Looking for some text about the birth of fashion photography, the other day I discovered the spectacular street photographs by the Seeberger Brothers, a trio of photographers who ran a studio in Paris from the 1920's and were the first to bring fashion outdoors, paving the road for the art of fashion photography in a time when sketches and drawings were still considered more suitable to promote clothes and accessories than stills.Creators of timeless shots celebrating style as quality of the individual rather than advertising one brand or another, their photos are an amazing crossover between an ante litteramSartorialist (here's his own hommage to the brothers, here's the link to a monography devoted to their work) and an August Sander on gin & tonic.

Sunday, May 16, 2010

As you may have noticed, the lansdcape is a recurrent element in the photographic works I write about here. That fine line between documentary and artistic photography, often described by those authors who choose to shape the urban and natural views in a personal vision, is exactly the place where the dilemma between taking or making a photograph can be solved: we see images of uncharted spaces in photographs speaking with a quiet voice, not afraid of eyes who might miss their countless little hidden treasures, and offer the gift of a broader perspective to those who choose to look closer, a chance for discovery. John Davies is of course one of those photographers, and his mention is definitely an overdue one.

Friday, May 7, 2010

"As we drove along gravel roads past fields of clover and alfalfa, corn and wheat, past orchards and pastures and hardwood groves my father's eyes moved constantly over the landscape. He had a thirst for the look of it. I remember wondering what it was that he was always looking at. Eventually I learned to see what he saw, to love what he loved."

When I read Rhondall McKinney's biography, I felt some kind of relief for having found the answer to the question that was haunting me: why do I end up so often longing for photographic works like his own? Landscapes, views, images often with no clear subject, or rather images where the subject is the whole image, with its many paths to walk through with our eyes. I love 'slow' photographs, they make me think about watching the movies, about how different it is to watch the average Hollywood product compared to any movie that is just meant to express the true dream or ambition of a director. In the typical Hollywood movie, if a character is just standing not doing anything particular, surrounded by silence and stillness, we know that shortly something shocking will happen. In the other movie, we will be only asked to feel the inner movement of a human body below the skin, its breath, its heartbeat, the feelings moving inside that person. Same with photography, where certain images are condemned to convey subject matters that force them into compositions and sequences meant for quick consumption, or bound to mean or state something; other photographs, on the contrary, are simply like a fireplace you sit next to, watching the flames endlessly moving.

Excellent landscape photography (will she be fine with my quick description of her patient art?) by Alia Malley, whose work I discovered by merely running through the visitors of this blog's Facebook page (btw, it might be worth a visit every once in a while, there's links and photogalleries of stuff that often does not end up here). The profile picture with her standing next to a gorgeous wooden folding 8x10 was enough to make me rush to her website, and her images match perfectly her pose in the photo, scanning the horizon, one hand shielding her eyes from the sun.

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

I immediately fell in love with Gilbert Fastenaekens' night photographs, there is something timeless about those roads and those buildings (was he wandering in the dark with Brassaï in another life, did he convince Atget that night could be a great time for work?), something that makes everything look like a scene from an old classic movie, footpaths full of ghosts, closed windows hiding countless stories, amazing images where we feel like we're really witnessing the mystery of the night, in another world where we might not even belong.More images here, here a commissioned work made in the town of Treviso, Northern Italy, in 2005.

Monday, May 3, 2010

...yes! As long as it offers a mix of conceptual convoluted ideas with some kind of hommage for two masters of the photographic art, like the project TOBERND/YOURHILLA by Didier Falzone.

"In the TOBERND,YOURHILLA project, each slot of the 3x3 logo grid evoke one of the storage silos arranged into grid for comparation of form and design. These logos try to suggest some of the forces of the composition to get a visual representation to be used as one-way identity. Once the nine signs will be assigned, the digital manipulation will mirror itself in a systematic auto-generated community."

So what you see on the upper right side of the blog is the slot I've chosen, and it hides some graphic rendition of the intrinsic logic and movement behind one image by the Bechers.Me, I've picked that because it reminds me of Hippolyte Bayard's face in his Drowned's self-portrait...